November 29 1920 years
In a Tomsk village Dubinkino (now Novosibirsk region) was born Egor Ligachev — Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, a pioneer of perestroika. He coined the phrase "Boris, you're wrong."
I sometimes change my views, but not my worldview.
He grew up in a poor peasant family. After graduating from the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1943, he returned to Novosibirsk and worked as an engineer at an aircraft factory. He joined the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Even during his time at the institute, he distinguished himself in public life and within the Komsomol.
After the war, he quickly rose to the post of First Secretary of the Regional Komsomol Committee. By the age of 39, he had become First Secretary of the Novosibirsk Regional Committee, but was almost immediately transferred to Moscow, to the CPSU Central Committee, where he worked on industry, propaganda, and agitation. He assessed the people he worked with as either "motor-driven" (energetic) or "non-motor-driven."
In 1965 Brezhnev at Ligachev's request, he returned him to his native Siberia - in Tomsk. For the next 20 years, he headed the local regional committee there.
The Tomsk period was the most interesting, the most wonderful in my life.
The Tomsk period also became one of the "dark" spots in his biography. Under Ligachev, in the spring of 1979, the shore collapsed. Kolpashevsky Yar, Where thousands of prisoners were shot and buried during Stalin's purges, a section of the burial ground, where people had been laid in dense layers, was exposed. To prevent publicity, the authorities brought in two tugboats, which began eroding the sandy shore with a powerful jet of water from their propellers. Falling corpses were crushed by these same propellers, and bodies that floated down the river were caught from boats and sunk in the river, tying them to the metal they no longer needed.
The operation was carried out under the control of the KGB chairman. Yuri Andropov, who, 4 years later, invited Ligachev to the post of Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU (appointed him bypassing Chernenko, (While on vacation). When a criminal case was opened in 1990 for vandalism against the murdered men, Ligachev testified that the KGB had led the operations and that civilians had no say. In 1992, the case was closed "due to lack of evidence of a crime."
In 1985, he supported the candidacy Gorbachev He was appointed General Secretary and became a member of the Politburo, effectively the second-in-command of the party and the state. He was one of the leaders of perestroika and the anti-alcohol campaign.
We wanted to quickly rid the people of drunkenness. But we were mistaken.
Was one of those who brought Yeltsin Into big politics: in 1985, he personally traveled to Sverdlovsk to "take a closer look" at it. And that night, he called Gorbachev and said: "This is our man, we must take him!"
But just three years later, he abruptly interrupted Yeltsin's speech at a party conference—these words became a catchphrase:
Communist Yeltsin took the wrong path. It turned out that man possesses destructive, not creative, power. You, Boris, have not drawn the right political conclusions.
(1988)
By 1990, he already regretted his support for Gorbachev, calling it "his biggest personnel mistake."
During the August putsch, he sided with the State Emergency Committee, but did not participate in the attempted coup.
There was no meanness in Ligachev's character; he spoke his mind. He was not the man for secret plots and coups, but rather wanted to openly win over the majority of the Politburo and the Central Committee to his side.
(Editor-in-Chief of Ogonyok, Vitaly Korotich)
After the collapse of the USSR, he was a member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation for 20 years. In 1999, at 79, he became the oldest deputy of the State Duma of the third convocation.
I feel the bitterness of defeat, the bitterness of the disintegration of our party. The bitterness of the destruction of my homeland, my country. But when all this happened, I promised myself not to heap ashes on my head any longer, but to try at all costs to gather all my strength and ultimately restore people's rule.
He was involved in public and party work. He lived, he said, on his parliamentary pension and book royalties—he wrote "Who Betrayed the USSR" and "The Enigma of Gorbachev." He didn't regret not having "acquired oil rigs, estates, and foreign bank accounts" in his youth.
In one interview in 2008, he predicted a conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
He died on May 7, 2021, in Moscow, aged 101, due to a protracted lung disease.
After the age of dinosaurs, the age of rats begins. You'll regret us mammoths!
